HE was one of the most feared men inside the Provisional IRA. To rank-and-file ‘volunteers’, a knock on the door from John Joe Magee was the equivalent of a visit from the Angel of Death.

However, court documents leaked to the Sunday Herald show that Magee, head of the IRA’s infamous ‘internal security unit’, was trained as a member of Britain’s special forces. The IRA’s ‘torturer-in-chief’ was in reality one of the UK’s most elite soldiers.

The documents, lodged as part of a court action being taken against the British government by a disgruntled military intelligence agent, name Magee as a ‘former member of the Special Boat Squadron’.

The SBS is the marine equivalent to the SAS, with many in its ranks drafted from the Royal Marines, as in Magee’s case. IRA sources say that Magee had left the SBS by the time he joined the Provisionals. However, the public disclosure of his time as a member of the special forces will fuel speculation that Magee was an informer for the British.

Magee died recently in Dundalk, Ireland, from a heart condition. Since his death, the IRA has been embroiled in a catalogue of disclosures that some of its most respected members were working for British military intelligence.

Magee led the IRA’s internal security unit for more than a decade up to the mid-90s — most of those he investigated were usually executed.

Magee’s unit was tasked to hunt down, interrogate and execute suspected British agents within the IRA. The revelations about Magee’s time in the SBS came from a court witness statement by a British soldier who spent years working undercover inside the IRA for military intelligence.

In it, the soldier, referred to as KF, says: ‘I am a former member of the British Army and in hiding from the Provisional Irish Republican Army and other terrorist groups.

‘In 1979 I was approached by the Intelligence Corps, a branch of the British Army, whilst serving with my regiment the Royal Irish Rangers in Northern Ireland.

‘I was asked to infiltrate a terrorist group, namely the PIRA during this time as part of my undercover work for the Force Research Unit [the FRU is a covert intelligence gathering wing of the British army]. I was active in the commission of terrorist acts and crimes …

‘During this time my handlers were fully conversant with my activities and had guided me in my work which included the security section of the PIRA. The commanding officer of this section was John Joe Magee, a former member of the Special Boat Squadron.

‘The purpose of this unit was solely to hunt out agents and informers of the British state. The suspected agents would be … tortured and murdered after obtaining any information.’

Soldier KF filed the witness statement on behalf of a former British spy, who can only be identified as Agent F. Due to court gagging orders obtained by the Ministry of Defence the names of those involved cannot be revealed.

Agent F worked for the FRU in Ulster in the late 1980s and 1990s gathering information on republican paramilitaries, without the knowledge of the RUC. He was later arrested because of his activities. During a raid on his home his eight-month pregnant girlfriend was confronted by RUC anti-terror officers armed with machine guns. She miscarried as a result.

Agent F has lodged lawsuits against Tony Blair for ‘withholding information from [him] regarding the death of [his] daughter’. Blair is also being sued for ‘breaching [his] duty of care to [Agent F] and … wilfully causing [him] to suffer mental anguish and financial loss as a result of the negligence and indifference of [Tony Blair] and his government’.

Agent F is also suing the MoD, a former RAF officer who acted as his contact point with the FRU, a major in the FRU and an FRU agent handler. In a previous court document, Agent F named the FRU major as the officer who was the handler of the British army’s most infamous agent inside the IRA — a man codenamed Stakeknife.

Stakeknife is one of Belfast’s leading Provisionals. His military handlers allowed him to carry out large numbers of terrorist murders in order to protect his cover within the IRA.

The activities of the FRU, which was headed by Brigadier Gordon Kerr, a Scottish officer, are the subject of long-running investigations by Scotland Yard. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir John Stevens is investigating whether the army used agents in terrorist organisations to carry out proxy assassinations for the British state.

The most high-profile killing linked to the FRU is that of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane who was killed by the UDA in 1989. Details on Finucane were passed by the FRU to Brian Nelson, a British soldier who had infiltrated the UDA. Nelson then supplied UDA murder teams with the information.

In his witness statement to the High Court, the former British soldier KF, who worked inside the IRA’s internal security section, says: ‘My unit had received instructions in 1993 to search for and abduct an agent known [to the IRA] as ‘Rosebud’ … I now know this to be [Agent F]. I believe that [his] life and that of others is and has always been at risk from terrorist actions, clearly [the MoD] has a responsibility to all its intelligence contacts both past and present.

‘[The MoD] has deliberately sacrificed the lives of intelligence agents and has wilfully, through covert action, allowed lives to be taken. [The MoD] has a history of abandonment, wilfully placing the lives of intelligence agents at risk. ‘

KF goes on to accuse the British government of ‘giving terrorists a mandate to abduct, interrogate and murder sources of intelligence’, citing the 1999 assassination of Charles Bennett, a Belfast taxi driver who was killed for being a police informer, as an example of an agent being abandoned by handlers.

KF says that Agent F’s life is at risk and that ‘terrorists will attempt to abduct him … extract information from [him] … and murder [him]‘.

The revelations made by KF about John Joe Magee’s years in the British special forces sparked a new round of speculation within republican ranks about the possibility that Magee was a double-agent.

One source close to the IRA said: ‘Magee had the power over life and death. If you were taken for questioning by him, he could fix it so you lived, or he could make sure you died. He was in a prime position to work for the British.

‘When an operation went wrong, he took statements from everyone involved and decided whether or not to launch an inquiry into possible leaks. This would have made great reading for the Brits … He could have saved informers or made sure real IRA volunteers were wrongly killed.

‘There was a lot of talk that Magee would torture people … but I never saw proof of this for myself. He certainly was a brutal man, however. But he’s dead now and the truth about his life is probably buried with him.’

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Omagh Bombers Appeal; Evidence Suggests Prior Knowledge
[…]
But investigation in to the Omagh bombing doesn’t end there. Many of the elements that are now widely known to occur during false flag operations are present if we take a second look at the evidence and whistleblower testimony.

Over the course of several years, a series of articles in the British and Irish press reported on stories told by a Kevin Fulton, the pseudonym of a British double agent in the IRA. Fulton became a highly controversial whistleblower regarding collusion between the British Army and the IRA, something the average citizen will have a hard time understanding.

In 2001 he spoke out about the Omagh bombing, saying that “security forces didn’t intercept the Real IRA’s Omagh bombing team because one of the terrorists was a British double-agent whose cover would have been blown as an informer if the operation was uncovered.”

But it wasn’t just about covering their tracks.

He also claimed to have “phoned a warning to his RUC handlers 48 hours before the Omagh bombing that the Real IRA was planning an attack and gave details of one of the bombing team and his car registration.” [4]

In 2003, senior officials in the Irish Police were “accused of ignoring a clear warning about the Omagh bomb atrocity to protect a Real IRA informer,” and “the bomb was allowed to ‘go through’ to preserve [the informer’s] role in the terrorist organization.”[5]

A year prior, family members of the victims of the bombing attempted to set a meeting with Prime Minister Tony Blair regarding their concerns over the police investigations, however, Blair “angered families…by refusing to meet them.” [6]

Then in 2006 it was reported that “the British security service, MI5, withheld vital anti-terrorism intelligence just months before the Omagh bombing…”[7]

The picture emerging here is far more complex and sinister than people want to accept, but a large part of the Irish troubles seem to lie with British Intelligence and double agents, turning the other cheek or adding flames to the fire rather than trying to put them out.

As reported in The Guardian:
Britain allowed “IRA informers to organise ‘human bomb’ attacks,” a tactic which “involved forcing civilians to drive vehicles laden with explosives into army checkpoints.”

The Times reported:
“MI5 arranged a weapons-buying trip to America” where detonators were obtained, “later used by terrorists to murder soldiers and police officers,”

“British intelligence co-operated with the FBI to ensure [‘Fulton’s] trip to New York in the 1990s went ahead without incident so that his cover would not be blown.” Further, “the technology he obtained has been used in Northern Ireland and copied by terrorists in Iraq in roadside bombs that have killed British troops.”

Sinn Féin has also had close ties to British Intelligence.

In 2006 it was revealed that Sinn Fein’s chief negotiator Martin McGuinness was accused of being a British spy by former Army intelligence officer Martin Ingram, who identified Belfast republican Freddie Scappaticci as a double agent 2 years before that. [8]

Interestingly, “Scappaticci has made millions in a taxpayer-funded resettlement package which was put in place after his cover was blown,” and “has also been given a new home, a new job, a new identity and a new face, thanks to plastic surgery,” as a result of help from MI5. Even the Sunday Herald, which reported this story, “was threatened with a court gagging order when MI5 was alerted that the paper planned to tell readers about Scappaticci’s new life.” [9]

Denis Donaldson, who was a PRIA member and later headed Sinn Féin’s administration office, admitted to the BBC that he was a British agent for two decades.

Shortly afterwards, he was expelled from the party, and less than four months later he was found shot dead hours before a planned visit to Northern Ireland by Prime Minister Tony Blair. [10]

In 2008 it was revealed that the personal driver for Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams, Roy McShane, “was an informer in the pay of MI5.” On top of this, Sean O’Callaghan, a member of Sinn Fein’s ruling council, also happened to be “working for the Irish police.” [11]

With the convictions of the Omagh Bombers resting solely on the statement of a dubious agent, who joined the FBI to solve his financial problems and who was bribed to give testimony, and the evidence of prior knowledge within the Intelligence agencies about the attacks…the only logical way of moving forward and getting real justice would be an independent inquiry.

The infiltration and links between British intelligence and the Irish terrorists are far too numerous to brush under the carpet. And the very systems they built up are now involved in the middle-east.

In 2007, it was reported that the Force Research Unit, the group set up to aid collusion with loyalist paramilitaries, had changed its name to the Joint Support Group (JSG) and was active in Iraq since the US-UK invasion in 2003.

As reported by The Telegraph:
JSG agents “are trained to turn hardened terrorists into coalition spies using methods developed on the mean streets of Ulster during the Troubles, when the Army managed to infiltrate the IRA at almost every level. Since war broke out in Iraq in 2003, they have been responsible for running dozens of Iraqi double agents.”

Interestingly, in 2003, the former head of the FRU in Northern Ireland throughout the Troubles, Brigadier Gordon Kerr, had “been sent to the Gulf to head up British spying activities in the Middle East” [12] and went on to head the JSG in Iraq after the occupation.[13]

It now seems that for a long time, counted in decades, the British government not only had a window into the IRA’s internal discussion and organisation but the means to pull levers and eliminate opponents within it.

At least from the date of Scappaticci offering his services to MI5, reportedly in 1978, and the consolidation of the security unit around him, it is difficult to see how any major IRA operation could have taken place without some level of British knowledge, conceivably before and certainly after the event. The atmosphere of internal distrust over that period is well documented in journalist Ed Moloney’s A Secret History of the IRA.

It is also clear that the military disasters suffered served to strengthen the influence of the leadership around Adams and McGuinness, who were advocating a constitutional settlement with the British government.

However, Britain’s spies would not have simply been used to thwart IRA operations. They would have colluded with many of them and allowed them to be successful if this was considered to be politically expedient.

The conflict’s worst single atrocity, the Omagh bombing in 1998, left 29 dead and 220 injured. The bomb’s maker is alleged to have been an intelligence asset along with the man who stole the car used for the attack. Omagh—allegedly carried out by the hard-line splinter group, the Real IRA, in an effort to sabotage the Good Friday Agreement establishing the Northern Ireland Assembly—had the opposite effect.

The horrific deaths of both Protestants and Catholics prompted even greater popular support for an end to the conflict and Sinn Fein’s first-ever condemnation of republican violence. The INLA soon declared its own ceasefire, and the Real IRA suspended its operations. It subsequently issued a statement claiming that its own involvement was “minimal” and that the bombing was the work of two MI5 agents—an allegation lent credence by BBC’s “Panorama,” which insisted that police on both sides of the Irish border had knowledge of the bomb plot.

How many similar attacks were allowed to go ahead? What was known beforehand of Bloody Friday, July 21, 1972, when 22 bombs were exploded in central Belfast killing nine bystanders; or of the series of pub bombings in the UK in the 1970s; the 1982 Hyde Park and Regent’s Park bombs; the 1987 Remembrance Day attack on Enniskillen; or the 1990s London and Manchester bombings? How many of the countless sectarian killings in Northern Ireland were carried out with at least some level of insight, foreknowledge or even approval from the British authorities?

IRA bombings were seized on by successive British governments and the military to legitimise all manner of undemocratic measures—the maintenance of a large standing army in Northern Ireland and the creation of a special apparatus skilled in surveillance, infiltration, entrapment, assassination, and psychological operations, as well as to manipulate public opinion and justify repressive and undemocratic measures in the name of combating terrorism.

Just as fundamentally, terrorist outrages and killings served to deepen the sectarian divisions in the working class in Northern Ireland. Belfast is still divided along religious lines by concrete walls, a precursor to the policy now pursued by the UK and the United States in Iraq. Northern Ireland has thus provided British imperialism with a vital training ground in which to hone its counterinsurgency techniques.

Notwithstanding Sinn Fein’s intermittent left rhetoric, the IRA complemented the loyalist gangs and death squads in dividing and terrorising ordinary working people. For decades, the IRA recruited on the most minimal basis—family ties, opposition to British rule, and the willingness to shoot soldiers. It is this that allowed the likes of British Spy Kevin Fulton, having served in the British Army, to infiltrate the organisation after mouthing a few nationalist phrases and playing on his penchant for guns and trouble.

As to the scale of such infiltration, some indication has been provided by material shown to members of the Consultative Group on the Past (CGP), established in 2007 by then Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain and claiming to be dedicated to “building a shared future that is not overshadowed by the events of the past.”

The group, led by Lord Robin Eames, a former bishop and primate with the Church of Ireland, and Denis Bradley, a former priest, journalist and member of the Northern Ireland policing board, was reportedly shown 10 filing cabinets containing records relating to agents and informers in both loyalist and republican groups. Three related to informers within the IRA.

„The British government refuses to cooperate with the Irish government in its investigations into the Dublin and Monaghan car bombs, which killed 33 people. Only 17 pages of the 3,000-page report by the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner John Stevens into allegations of collusion between British intelligence and loyalist paramilitaries were published.”

The programme asserted that the complexity of the attack and the characteristics of the explosions indicated training and planning beyond the capacity of loyalist forces acting unaided and strongly implied that the security forces in the North had likely helped the attackers. Pointing to a covert unit of the British Army in Castledillon, the programme makers suggested that the attack had been allowed to happen in order to protect British Army agents in the UVF. The allegations revolved around Army Captain Robert Nairac. “Hidden Hand” stated that McConnell, Boyle and “the Jackal” were controlled by Nairac. Hanna, meanwhile, was allegedly run separately by the British Army from Lisburn and 3 Brigade HQ in Lurgan….

„Colin Wallace was framed for manslaughter in 1981 by the British judicial system in reprisal for his exposure of black propaganda used against non-military and political opponents of army policy and a plot from within the MI5 intelligence services to bring down the Wilson Labour government. He also exposed child abuse at the Kincora Boys’ Home, demanded it be stopped, and protested when he realised that the intelligence services were blackmailing a leading loyalist involved in the abuse to ensure his assistance in their efforts at manipulating the loyalist gangs.
Wallace’s conviction was not quashed until 1996.”

Yorkshire Television’s ‚First Tuesday’ documentary claimed British Military Intelligence was involved in the Dublin and Monaghan Bombings .

„The Yorkshire Television claim is supported by several professional analysts, including a former Garda Commissioner and a former head of the British Army’s EOD network, Lieutenant Colonel George Styles.”

„In April 1999 it was reported that the Garda Special Branch were looking at fresh claims by a former member of the RUC that British military intelligence and the UDR were involved in the bombing…

„David Seaman claimed at a press conference in Dublin that he was a member of an SAS unit that was detailed to cause explosions to discredit the IRA. He was soon found shot in the head..

„As soon as Labour won the February 1974 election, MI5 began destabilising Prime Minister Harold Wilson and his policies in Northern Ireland. In May 1974, the Power-sharing Executive was brought down by the Ulster Workers’ Council strike – with the help of MI5 and the Loyalist paramilitaries.

„Two days into the strike, Loyalist paramilitaries exploded car-bombs in Dublin and Monaghan, without warning, during the evening rush-hour, killing 33 civilians – 26 in Dublin and 7 in Monaghan. To date, these bombings led to the largest loss of life in the conflict over the last 26 years.

„At a press conference in Dublin in March 1989, Irish journalist Frank Doherty noted that the bombings happened during the high-point of efforts by MI5 to bring down the Power-sharing Executive. He also said that he had been told in 1974, by a former British soldier, Albert ‚Ginger’ Baker (also a member of the MRF), that the bombings were ‚definitely an Intelligence job’ Baker had a been a member of the Loyalist unit that had carried out the bombings, and Doherty claimed that it was a pseudo gang formed as a front by British Intelligence.”

Sir John Stevens’ report on his third investigation into matters of collusion in Northern Ireland:

The report has found that a covert army unit, the Force Research Unit (FRU), commanded by Brigadier Gordon Kerr, colluded with Loyalist hit-squads to kill Catholics in the 1980s and 1990s. The FRU passed information to Loyalist terrorists, mainly through Brian Nelson, an agent who infiltrated the Ulster Defence Association. Many of the victims had no involvement with terrorism. Details passed to the Loyalist hit-squads included those of Pat Finucane. Brigadier Kerr is still serving with the British army.

John Stephens said that he was obstructed throughout his enquiries. He said that the collusion ranged from the wilful failure to keep records, the absence of accountability, the withholding of intelligence and evidence, through to the extreme of agents being involved in murder.
—————-

On Monday, the world was stunned by the release of a report by Nuala O’Loan, the police ombudsman for Northern Ireland, which stated that Special Branch officers in Belfast had „colluded” with loyalist terrorists working for the British state as informers. According to O’Loan, police failed to stop these paramilitary gangs, part of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) from killing an estimated 15 people in the 1990s. While this was seized upon by republicans as proof that security forces had aided a loyalist campaign of sectarian assassination, in reality O’Loan’s findings barely scratched the surface of a 30-year history of criminality and murder orchestrated by the British army and the Ulster police.

HE INSISTS on being named only as „JB”, a sick, ageing man, who fears that ill-health or a bullet from an assassin wishing to silence him will claim his life before he has the chance to tell the true story of his life and crimes. On Wednesday, JB passed a bundle of papers to the Sunday Herald, making up the bulk of his unpublished memoirs, which paint British military intelligence as a callous, murderous, criminal cabal. JB claims that he – and dozens of other members of the terrorist organisation, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) – were trained and armed by military intelligence.
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He also claims select UVF officers were ordered by military intelligence to carry out assassinations against both IRA figures and ordinary Catholics. Such soft targets as innocent men and women were pinpointed by military intelligence in order to psychologically undermine the nationalist population of Northern Ireland and cut the support base from beneath the Provisional IRA.

Almost every time acts of terrorist violence have occurred in Northern Ireland (and regardless of whether it was the IRA or the Protestant paramilitaries who were responsible), the victims have habitually accepted the official reports of what happened. In the case of the Omagh bombing (August 15, 1998), when families did not blithely or blindly accept the made-for-TV spin, and did conduct a private investigation into the reasons for the atrocity, we find the whole propaganda machinery being tossed out the window in no time at all.

I recommend the movie Omagh to those readers who are interested in studying the occult history of Ireland. It will serve as a good primer on the subject. While watching the movie, remember that the protagonists were Protestant men and women who believed that their elected government officials would never lie to them and that the police were their best friends. By the end of their traumatic investigations, however, they were able to discern their actual enemy. Shockingly, it was not, as everyone erroneously believed, the IRA.

A must see movie that exposes the British complicity in IRA terrorist attacks. (Watch Trailer)

Indeed, studying the history of the IRA (Irish Republican Army) is both interesting and revealing. It is a study that has, in the end, less to do with politics and more to do with secret orders and hidden agendas. The persistent student eventually becomes aware that, from the earliest times, some of the most notorious and conspicuous founders and leaders of the major Irish rebel bodies were in fact counter-revolutionaries. They were agents of the British establishment. There is evidence to show that this was almost certainly the case with the infamous James Stephens (IRB), John O’Mahony (Fenian Brotherhood), and P. J. Tynan (Invincibles). In our opinion, nothing has changed. We believe that the insidious ploy is still in effect today. Men of this sort, positioned as they were in senior positions of Irish rebel organizations, were not interested in freeing the Irish people. They worked for the contrary purpose, and were, we believe, instructed to make sure that authentic revolutionary movements did not rise to successfully threaten the British establishment or imperial status quo. In our opinion, they were supremely successful. It is our contention that many leaders of terrorist cells throughout the world – be they of the political „left” or „right” – are, in fact, expert fifth columnists, funded and instructed by agents of British Intelligence. Some recent examples are F. W. De-Klerk and Nelson Mandela of South Africa, Boris Yeltsin of Russia, Lech Walesa of Poland, and Robert Mugabe of Rhodesia. This fact remains largely unknown to the masses. It remains unknown to the duped members of the world’s many secret societies and terrorist movements.